The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

May 23, 2016

José Santos Chocano

José
Santos Chocano [Peru]

1875-1934

Born in Lima
Peru on May 14, 1875, José Santos Chocano (Gastañodi) was a major Peruvian poet
and political activist. Chocano attended the National University of San Marcos
at the age of 14, but after a short jail term for political activism, he moved
to Madrid, a city in the early 20th century filled with notable
artists and poets such as Juan Gris, Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote the prologue
for his book Alma America, Marcelino
Menéndez y Pelayo, and Rubén Darío, who helped establish the young poet from
Peru into the international scene.

That 1906 poetry collection, perceived as
a “new world” corrective to the cosmopolitan modernism of Ruben Dario, brought
Chocano major attention, allowing the poet to travel and work for various different
regimes throughout Latin and Central America with various political figures,
including Pancho Villa in Mexico, Manuel Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala, and even
Woodrow Wilson in the US, with whom he struck up a substantial correspondence.

After the 1920 coup, which deposed
Estrada Cabrera, Chocano was briefly imprisoned, returning after to Peru, where
he associated with President August B. Leguia. In 1922, he became The Poet
Laureate of Peru, attracting a group of older and younger Peruvian authors.

Three years later, he became involved in
a dispute with the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos, soon after furious
when younger Peruvian students sided with the Mexican writer. Journalist Edwin
Elmore, who had written an article about the dispute, met with Chocano after
writing an article on the poet, and was shot and killed by Chocano.

After two years of imprisonment, Chocano
moved to Santiago de Chile, where in lived in deep poverty, while preparing a
new collection of poems, Primcias de Oro
de Indias. Chocano was stabbed to death on a streetcar in 1934, some
reporting the murderer was a madman stranger, others that the murder involved a
love affair.

He also wrote prose works and political
documents.

Today he is considered one the most
important poets of Latin-American modernism, along with Ruben Dario, Manuel
González Prada, José Marti, Manuel Gutiéerrez Májero, José Asunción Silva and
others.